Looking Beyond Scapegoats

Since the tragic suicide of the nurse involved in the 2day FM prank call media outlets, fuelled by regular readers and viewers, have been baying for blood. The prime targets have of course been the two DJs who made the prank call in the first place. As much the call was juvenile and intended to humiliate someone and the decision to air the call without permission is appalling (a decision I doubt the DJs in question would have personally made) their is a wider responsibility than just the two DJs.
 

Ever since the story emerged I have wondered how the nurses workplace superiors responded to the situation. I think most people have been in enough workplaces to know that some work superiors would take empathy with you and go into bat for you and others would blame you completely including possibly dismissing you from your job. It has been recently revealed that a suicide note is critical of the way that hospital staff responded to the prank call. Exactly what this criticism is, of course, I don't know

Then there is the culture around celebrity (including the royal family) that on the one hand we (collectively) demand that their private lives be private and on the other hand that we should know every detail about their private lives. Hence we send in the paparazzi to chase down celebrity to get every detail doing the dirty work for us being our scapegoat so we can enjoy the results of what they do whilst simultaneously being disgusted by them. Really, all the DJs were was paparazzi in disguise. Instead of hanging of window ledges and taking photos or tapping phones, they just got the information in a far more novel way. What drove the paparazzi to chase down Princess Diana is what drove 2Day FM to not only make the phone call put broadcast it without permission.

We need to take responsibility. This tragedy is not just the result of the sin of two DJs. There are greater systemic problems at play. The first of which we need to address is our desire to simplicity scapegoat someone. Whether that's a workplace scapegoating a single employee, media consumers scapegoating paparazzi, our scapegoating the two DJs, Or even more tragically a single person scapegoating themselves for something that was not their fault..